The Backlit Gallery in Sneinton is hosting a ‘immersive Virtual Reality experience’ on 9 July. By wearing a VR headset visitors will be able to explore the sights and sounds of the textile factory of I&R Morley as it looked in the late 19th century.

The VR experience is part of a day of events at Backlit on 9 July, from 12 noon to 5pm, which will be devoted to Sneinton and the life and legacy of Samuel Morley (1809-1886), a Nottingham MP, textile manufacturer, social reformer and philanthropist.

Three years ago, “The Labrador Companion” was discovered in Yorkshire. This is a previously unknown manuscript written by Captain George Cartwright (1739-1819) about his years spent in Labrador. It is both an instructional text unlike any others related to the early fur trade in eastern North America, and it is also a text about natural history observations.

Cartwright was born at the manor house in Marnham, on the banks of the River Trent in Nottinghamshire, and went on to become a pioneer settler in Labrador in the far north east of Canada. He was nick-named ‘Labrador’ Cartwright having lived for nearly 16 years in these sub-arctic lands hunting and collecting animals and skins for export.

This annotated edition, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, transcribes ‘The Labrador Companion’ in full. Cartwright documented the everyday work of Labrador’s particular kind of fur-trade life based on his experiences operating a series of merchant stations in southern Labrador between 1770 and 1786.

A wide variety of historical articles in the latest edition of East Midlands History & Heritage: letters from Charlie Clarke on the Western Front to his girlfriend back in Gainsborough; the trial and execution in 1823 of three men convicted of sodomy; defamation in Nottinghamshire in the early modern period; The Battle of Waterloo and Nottinghamshire’s ‘chosen men’; the Reformatory at Mount St. Bernard in Leicestershire; Magna Carta and the Uffington
Connection; discovering the Archaeology of Rufford Abbey Country Park 2013-2015; the Mayflower Pilgrims
in the East Midlands; Ellerslie House for Paralysed
Sailors and Soldiers in Nottingham.